Robert Vickers: Why I'm voting for Mitt Romney

Voting for president should never be an easy decision. Rather than follow the directives of family, community or even one’s own ballot history, voters should challenge their own inclinations, survey the challenges of the time and consider the attributes best suited to meet them.

I’ve wrestled with these considerations in deciding how I’ll vote in Tuesday’s election, and I’ve decided to vote for Mitt Romney. Though I’ve never publicly shared my choice before, I’m doing so now as a catharsis of how I came to my decision, not to influence anyone else.

No party consideration, ideology, race or religion factor into my choice — I’ve never even been a member of the Democratic or Republican parties. It’s a pragmatic decision made more about the incumbent than about the challenger. And it’s predicated on the hardships the nation must address in 2013.

It wasn’t an easy decision. In his attempt to win the office, Romney has taken such a slew of conflicting positions that Barack Obama has dubbed the tactic “Romnesia.” Americans should legitimately wonder whether Romney even knows what he believes in.

But I can’t vote for President Obama, who was a first-term senator when he was elected president, because he has proved to be out of his depth wading into Washington’s shark-infested waters.

The nation’s first biracial president was swept into office on the intoxicating high of national aspiration and economic desperation. But Americans awoke to a hangover of inevitable disappointment. Though the expectations voters placed on the charismatic 2008 winner were too high for any president, Obama embraced them in order to get elected and should be judged by them.

Whether or not he returns for a second term, he’ll be considered America’s noble 21st-century political experiment. But the next president must guide the country through challenges we already know and unseen impediments yet to reveal themselves. That will require getting action out of a contrarian, do-nothing Congress.

Bill Clinton did it by taking the lemons of a GOP-controlled House and making lemonade out of welfare reform. Faced with a vociferous Democrat-controlled House, conservative icon Ronald Reagan allowed some tax hikes to implement his broader supply-side economic vision. That balance of compromise and adroit deal-making is sorely needed in the next president.

Robert Vickers

After a contentious and unproductive deadlock with congressional Republicans, Obama concedes he didn’t deliver in Washington’s dysfunctional partisan snake pit. Now, he promises to “wash John Boehner’s car [and] walk Mitch McConnell’s dog” in a second term to retire the acrimony he shared with the House speaker and Senate minority leader.

By all accounts he is a smart man, a well-meaning man. But he was woefully unprepared to do what Reagan and Clinton did so ably — set personal animus aside, put the nation first and move America comprehensively forward. Believing otherwise is little more than wishful thinking.

Romney has emerged as a viable alternative with a greater capacity to get a reluctant Congress to act. That ability is critical to America’s success in the next four years and beyond. It seems the old moderate Mitt who revered his father — a passionate progressive who failed in his own presidential bid — is more inclined to govern in the tradition of presidents who inhabited the office without particular ideological objectives or arbitrary agendas.

His detached-but-respectable record as a governor of a state with a mega majority Democratic legislature suggests he is more likely to be the moderate president the nation needs to bring political factions together than the fire-breathing “severely conservative” candidate he contorted himself into to get the GOP nomination.

Romney has been deceptive and dishonest in his campaign, but he has been no less disappointing than the Washington neophyte in the White House who promised a bipartisan nirvana four years ago and failed to deliver.

At a time of great economic despair and a shortsighted Congress, Romney’s election would be better for the nation than Obama’s return. His private equity background should calm the nation’s business community. His role as party leader should loosen the tribalistic gridlock that set in after Obama abandoned bipartisanship. And his tenure as a chief executive of a relevant state will return a sense of experienced stewardship to the capital.

Granted, there is plenty to differ with Romney about. But placing the nation’s long-term interests ahead of a short-term comfort zone, I am compelled to cast a ballot that might cost America a social limb, but salvages its fiscal life.

So I’ll be voting for the candidate that I believe is better situated to put the nation’s interests first, get action out of Congress and govern effectively with moderate pragmatism. I’ll be voting for Mitt Romney.

Robert Vickers is The Patriot-News’ political writer. rvickers@patriot-news.com.